Play House – LEGO goes modular

Play House is an automata that generates slow hypnotic acid house through mechanisms built from LEGO Technic. This piece was made for AudioGraft 2014 with a commission from Oxford Contemporary Music. A modular synth project created by Alex Allmont, that generates acid house music.

Behind the scenes: Today the plan was to hook this sequencer up to the TB303 but here was a lot more fiddly stuff than expected, so this video just demonstrates the note matrix which will eventually send CV note values over to the synth. Each note is triggered on a quarter note (I’m limiting the sequencer to 2 beats per bar rather than 4) and each relates to a single column in the note matrix. How far up or down that column makes contact with the row determines the note pitch value.